Why You Should Start Postmortems with What Questions to Ground Incident Analysis.

What to Ask First When a PagerDuty Incident Hits the Wall

We’ve all been there: a ping, a vibration, a swirl of dashboards lighting up. An incident starts, the clock starts ticking, and the immediate urge is to fix it, fast. But there’s a quiet, stubborn truth that makes the whole process smoother in the long run: start with the right questions. In the world of incident response, prioritizing “what” questions during the post-event review sets the stage for real learning, solid improvements, and fewer repeat outages.

Let me explain the idea in plain terms. When something goes wrong, you can chase causes, assign blame, or chase timelines. You can ask who did what and when alerts fired. You can also map out how the team responded and what tools were used. But until you pin down the facts—the concrete events, the exact systems involved, the data observed—any deeper analysis risks drifting into speculation. That’s not a slam on curiosity; it’s a reminder that solid learning starts with solid facts.

What questions should take the lead

What questions are at the heart of a productive post-event review? They’re the ones that clarify the incident’s anatomy—the bones, so to speak—without guessing motives or methods. Here are the core “what” questions you’ll want to surface first:

• What happened, exactly?

• Give a concise incident summary. What was triggered? What went wrong? What was the immediate impact on users or customers?

• What systems and services were involved?

• Which components failed or degraded? Were databases, caches, queues, or external dependencies part of the issue? Were microservices communicating as expected?

• What data and signals showed the problem?

• Which logs, metrics, or traces indicated the failure? Were there error codes, spike patterns, or anomalous latency that pointed to the root of the trouble?

• What was the sequence of events?

• Can you reconstruct a reliable timeline from alert to remediation? When did the first alert occur? When did the incident become visible to users? When did engineers implement a fix?

• What was the impact?

• How many users or features were affected? Were there data losses, suspended transactions, or degraded performance? What were the service-level implications?

• What changes, if any, were in place before the incident?

• Were there deployments, config changes, or scaled resources that preceded the outage? Was a rollback considered or executed?

• What evidence do we have?

• Where are the screenshots, dashboards, and chat transcripts? Which on-call notes or runbooks were consulted? Can we attach logs or traces to the final write-up?

These questions build a factual scaffold. They aren’t about fingerprinting people or pointing fingers. They’re about mapping reality so the team can see clearly what to fix, what to monitor more tightly, and where to invest in resilience.

Why not start with who, when, or how? A quick reality check

You’ll hear suggestions to start with questions like:

• Who was involved?

• When did things happen?

• How did we fix it?

These are valuable, but they’re better placed after you’ve sketched the plain facts. Here’s why:

• Who questions tend to drift toward ownership or responsibility. While that’s important in some contexts, it can derail learning if it distracts from the incident’s mechanics. In a blameless postmortem, these details belong in a section about collaboration and communication rather than in the initial evidence gathering.

• When questions are about timing, which is useful for building a timeline, but timing alone doesn’t explain why the failure occurred. You need to connect timestamps to concrete events, decisions, and system states—the kind of context that lives in the “what” layer.

• How questions reach into methods and processes (for example, why a particular remediation path was chosen). That’s useful later, after you’ve documented what happened, to understand if the existing playbooks were adequate and where they might be strengthened.

In practice, you’ll start with what, then layer in why and how once the facts are anchored. The sequence helps keep the conversation constructive and focused on preventing future incidents rather than cataloging every misstep.

How to structure a what-first post-event write-up

A clear structure makes the information easy to digest and action-oriented. Here’s a practical layout you can adapt:

• Incident snapshot

• One-paragraph summary: what happened, when, and the observable impact.

• Impact and scope

• Which users or features were affected? How long did the outage last? What are the measurable consequences?

• Timeline of events (the core “what”)

• A precise, sourced sequence of events from trigger to remediation. Include where alerts came from, when responders joined, and when each fix was applied.

• The what: systems, signals, and data

• List the services, infrastructure, and data paths involved. Note the logs, metrics, traces, or dashboards that confirmed each point in the timeline.

• Immediate actions taken

• What steps did the on-call engineers take? Were there quick wins like killing a faulty process, rolling back code, or switching traffic? Which runbooks or playbooks guided those actions?

• Root cause (the reason the what happened)

• After mapping the facts, explain the underlying cause in clear terms. The emphasis remains on understanding, not blaming people.

• Corrective actions

• Short-term fixes to prevent a reoccurrence in the near term. This could be targeted code changes, config tweaks, or improved monitoring checks.

• Preventive actions and resilience

• Long-term improvements: updates to architecture, new tests, enhanced runbooks, alerting thresholds, or training that reduce the risk of a similar incident.

• Evidence and references

• Attach or link to the logs, dashboards, chat transcripts, or incident artifacts used to build the write-up.

A few practical tips that keep the focus right

• Stay blameless and objective

• Encourage honest reporting and collaboration. People should feel safe to share what they observed without fear of punishment. That openness is what makes the “what” layer credible.

• Use concrete data, not opinions

• When you say, “this happened because the service slowed down,” back it up with a metric trend, a log entry, or a timestamped event.

• Include a concise timeline

• A well-constructed timeline helps readers see cause-and-effect. It’s often easier to spot a single failing handshake or a stalled dependency when viewed chronologically.

• Link to artifacts

• Tie the narrative to concrete artifacts: error messages, code commits, deployment notes, and monitoring dashboards. This boosts credibility and makes remediation more actionable.

• Keep it approachable

• Mix precise terminology with plain language. A reader who isn’t deep in the weeds should still grasp the incident flow and the corrective path.

• Tie learning to runbooks

• If the incident revealed gaps in runbooks or onboarding, point to updates or new references. The best post-event write-ups become living documents that feed future response.

A quick mindset shift: think stories, not puzzles

A useful way to frame the post-event review is to treat it as a story about what happened, told with evidence. The protagonist is the system, the antagonist is the fault or fragility discovered, and the journey is a path toward a safer, more reliable environment. Center the narrative on what happened (the facts) before turning to why it happened and how we’ll prevent a repeat.

How this ties into PagerDuty and modern incident response

PagerDuty isn’t just about triggering alerts and paging the right people. It’s about orchestrating a fast, coordinated response and building a knowledge base that reduces the pain of future incidents. The what-first approach feeds clean incident timelines, crisp RCA-style analyses, and stronger runbooks. When teams document what happened with precision, they unlock better monitoring, more meaningful post-event reviews, and a culture that learns quickly.

Blameless postmortems, clear questions, and concrete actions are the heart of resilient teams. The goal isn’t to assign fault but to understand the fault lines in your system and shore them up. In the PagerDuty ecosystem, that translates to clearer incident records, stronger on-call readiness, and more reliable service delivery for users.

A few more reflections to carry forward

• Sometimes the simplest question yields the clearest answer: what changed just before the incident? A misconfigured feature flag, a burst in traffic, or a failing dependency can be hiding in that “what.”

• Don’t shy away from complexity, but don’t muddy the water either. You can acknowledge that multiple components contributed to the outage and still keep the initial focus on concrete, verifiable facts.

• Share the learnings broadly. The value of a strong what-first write-up comes not from a single team’s discovery but from how widely it informs future designs, tests, and monitoring.

In the end, the goal is straightforward: understand what happened in a way that guides effective improvement. When you start with the right questions—those crisp, fact-grounded “what” questions—you set the stage for clarity, accountability, and better resilience. And in a world where outages are part of the job, that clarity is priceless.

If you’d like to explore more about how to structure incident reviews, or to see examples of how teams document their timelines, signals, and actions in real-world PagerDuty workflows, there’s a wealth of resources and case studies out there. The common thread is simple: anchor your analysis in what happened, layer in why and how after the facts are on the table, and turn every incident into a stepping stone toward a smoother, more trustworthy service.